How Do You Reduce Your Corrective Maintenance Load?

As we have seen before, Corrective maintenance is a perfectly appropriate choice for resolving some scenarios and some malfunctions (you can look at some of the advantages and disadvantages of corrective maintenance). However, wherever possible, it is still better to plan your interventions in advance. To reduce the amount of corrective maintenance that you conduct, you could try to..:

Provide the appropriate tools

All staff need to have access to a full set of working tools so that they can act quickly and effectively. Using maintenance management software might be a suitable solution as it can collate all manuals and documents relating to equipment into a single platform and grant everyone access to them. It also brings together important reports, integration with other modules and advanced monitoring capabilities which can all help technicians do their job better.

Improve your team

You should try to join forces with qualified technicians that are trained to act quickly and efficiently in all types of equipment failures and malfunctions. As well as selecting the perfect team from the off, you can supplement the development of your team by providing them extra coaching or vocational training. Given the nature of maintenance work, which requires competent communication at all times, it is especially important to have a well motivated team that strives to maintain a good level of service.

Educate your staff

Any member of staff within the organisation should be able to carry out failure reporting. Non-maintenance staff should be equally capable to detect potential maintenance issues and differentiate them. For example, all staff should be able to recognise that an unusual noise during machine operation may signal a potential failure. Staff can use maintenance software to solve this issue. It will also make it easier for managers to assign the most appropriate technician for particular problems.

Automate technician assignments

Depending on the nature of the failure, malfunctions should be automatically assigned to the most appropriate technician without too much administrative work. For example, when a failure occurs in an electrical circuit, it is preferable that the task is automatically and seamlessly assigned to one of your electricians. If it is in the water system, it should be assigned to a plumber etc.

Optimise the team’s workload

A good solution to carrying out corrective maintenance is to schedule tasks based on the analysis of your work-order data. It will help you to prioritise your tasks and to ensure that your maintenance team are focusing their time on the most important jobs.

Check and organise failures

It is very useful for technicians and managers to be able to able to consult information regarding failures and their current status at any time from any place. Using a CMMS, staff can find out exactly what has been done and what tasks are still pending.

Maintain a good stock of equipment

Stockrooms should have a well-equipped reserve of diverse parts of equipment and materials. Technicians should not have to wait for long periods of times for simple items like bolts and screws!

Preserve assets

Equipment should be inspected whenever corrective maintenance is done carried out. This will help to identify the reason for the failure and to allow for action to be taken to eliminate or reduce the frequency of similar failures. Maintenance management software as Infraspeak can ease the work of technicians as it allows them to consult any tardy interventions or repeated failures.

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Corrective maintenance is not always the best course of action, however, it definitely does have its benefits. Depending on the maintenance level and the functions of the equipment, it may even prove to be the best solution. Organising corrective maintenance operations will help you to shorten periods of inactivity, to reduce the amount of hours worked as overtime, to better account for unforeseen troubles, to cut needless expenses and, of course, to save money!

There are plenty of choices when it comes to maintenance strategies. The solution might be considering the pros and cons of each and select the ones that are most suitable for your company. One of our most valuable advice is that corrective maintenance is always used as something strategic, rather than catastrophic. This is the best way to define the proper work plan and allocations.

There are plenty of choices to be made when it comes to maintenance strategies. Often , the best solution is to balance the pros and cons of each strategy and implement a carefully balanced and calculated combination of them all.

To summarise, we often say that corrective maintenance should be used for routine reparations rather than to fix catastrophic failures!